27 November 2014

Onscreen Display of Execution Progress for Selenium using AutoIT

The post describes a method of displaying the execution progress on screen for Selenium. All you need is an AutoIT script that you can convert to a ".exe" tooltip utility file and change a registry value which is read by the utility file. The below info-graphic displays the control flow.

The key to this design is the creation of a registry key on the system which is continuously read by the tooltip file and the value is displayed at the top right of the screen. Hence, as the registry key value is changed, the code in the tooltip utility refreshes the onscreen display with the new value. The utility needs to be launched only once at the start of the test execution. You can set this in the driver of your framework. Also, you need not kill the process every-time you start your test execution as you can set the registry value as 'EXIT' such that the utility exits itself.

Here is a small video that displays the idea in action.

The code below shows the code for creation of the registry key depending upon whether it exists or not and displays appropriate messages on the console.